Re: Propose to drop from the strawman: requirement for privacy policy disclosure

A statement in a privacy policy is per se a legal statement. It is a 
legal and political issue, the effects of which may vary from 
jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I'm not sure we can say whether it creates 
any additional liability for a network, much less what that liability 
might be.

More important to me is a bigger picture conceptual issue about what 
this group and standard can accomplish. In my view this is not the right 
venue for making legal or other requirements with regard to a company's 
business practices beyond the technical implementation of the standard 
and the collection and use of relevant data. I think it should be enough 
for this group to provide the framework and leave these other issues to 
other entities, probably on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis.

On 10/26/11 11:53 AM, Justin Brookman wrote:
> Given that you acknowledge that a response header and/or 
> machine-readable file also create an actionable hook for enforcement, 
> I don't understand the resistance to a human-readable statement that 
> does not rely on a user agent to interpret (apart from rendering the 
> web page).  It does not create any additional liability on the part of 
> the network.  As I said, I suppose I could live with an 
> acknowledgement elsewhere as long as there was some sort of mandated 
> response SOMEWHERE, but it's better from a user perspective if there's 
> also a place to go to find out in plain English if the company is 
> complaint with this spec, and I don't see why this is a heavy lift.
> Justin Brookman
> Director, Consumer Privacy Project
> Center for Democracy&  Technology
> 1634 I Street NW, Suite 1100
> Washington, DC 20006
> tel 202.407.8812
> fax 202.637.0969
> justin@cdt.org
> http://www.cdt.org
> @CenDemTech
> @JustinBrookman
>
> On 10/26/2011 11:23 AM, David Wainberg wrote:
>> I totally support verifiability and accountability. However, I do not 
>> think this standard has to accomplish both, but rather can provide 
>> the tools to do so.
>> The standard will be released into a larger context. It is not this 
>> group's or the W3C's role, in my opinion, to create a regulatory 
>> regime for online advertising. It is out of scope to create legal 
>> requirements as part of the standard. A flag in the header, or a 
>> machine readable file in a well-known location are logical technical 
>> additions to the spec, that would provide useful feedback to 
>> users/clients, and would support the efforts of relevant authorities 
>> to do enforcement.
>>
>> One other thing I want to clarify. You said, "the spec needs to lay 
>> out how to communicate to consumers that the header is being 
>> respected." I disagree. The spec can lay out a technical means to 
>> communicate that an entity intends to respect the header. There is no 
>> way to communicate whether it is actually respected. (This is an 
>> important distinction, in my view, because it goes to evaluating 
>> proposals for responses.)
>>
>> On 10/25/11 5:50 PM, Justin Brookman wrote:
>>> A lot of this effort is dedicated to verifiability --- isn't that 
>>> why we've spent so much time discussing the sending of compliance 
>>> headers?  Having an accountable statement of compliance is another 
>>> effort at that. 
>>> I suppose you could make an argument that it should be in the 
>>> technical spec instead of the compliance spec (though I would 
>>> disagree), but especially if third-party header responses are deemed 
>>> optional or a Bad Idea, the spec needs to lay out how to communicate 
>>> to consumers that the header is being respected.
>>>   If the header just flies into the blue with no standardized way to 
>>> disclose compliance, this process seems destined to fail; if nothing 
>>> else, privacy policy disclosure should be considered as an 
>>> alternative to automated header responses.
>>> Justin Brookman
>>> Director, Consumer Privacy Project
>>> Center for Democracy&  Technology
>>> 1634 I Street NW, Suite 1100
>>> Washington, DC 20006
>>> tel 202.407.8812
>>> fax 202.637.0969
>>> justin@cdt.org
>>> http://www.cdt.org
>>> @CenDemTech
>>> @JustinBrookman
>>>
>>> On 10/25/2011 5:16 PM, David Wainberg wrote:
>>>> Section 6.4 of the Compliance and Scope document states, "In order 
>>>> to be compliant with this specification, an operator of a 
>>>> third-party domain must clearly and unambiguously assert in the 
>>>> privacy policy governing that domain that it is in compliance with 
>>>> this specification." Such a requirement is out of scope of this 
>>>> standard and should not be included in the strawman. While it may 
>>>> be in scope to create tools that facilitate auditing and 
>>>> enforcement by other entities, it is not the role of this technical 
>>>> standard to impose legal requirements for compliance. Any such 
>>>> requirements will come from entities with relevant authority, e.g. 
>>>> Congress or the FTC in the US.